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Today’s post is quite exciting as its my first ever review. The lovely folks over at Sugar & Crumbs sent me some bits to have a play with. Sugar and Crumbs are a UK based company that make natural flavoured cocoa powder and icing sugars. I think it’s such a brilliant idea and am surprised that nobody has thought of it already! Their icing sugars start at £1.99 for 125g and cocoa powders at £2.99 for 125g. The maximum size you can purchase of either product on their website is 500g, but for those need more than the standard sizes available, you are able to contact them and they’ll make up a a larger package for you. They sent me chilli flavoured cocoa powder, coffee icing sugar and salted caramel icing sugar. I was then free to come up with whatever recipe I wanted.

Ladies and gentlemen I present to you; chilli chocolate cake donuts with a coffee glaze! I’m all about keeping it simple and wanted to give you a recipe that didn’t involve lots of rising and proving, and rising and waiting and…. (you get the idea). Good old Martha Stewart had a great recipe on her website that I adapted. As the name implies, the dough is similar to cake batter and uses baking powder and bicarbonate soda, rather than yeast as it’s raising agents. This means not much hanging around before you get to eat these babies. These doughnuts are deep fried, so you will ideally need a candy thermometer or a deep fryer where you can set the temperature – it really will make your life so so much easier.

The verdict

The donuts have a good chocolate flavour and are not at all dry, which can happen with cake doughnuts.

I found that I wasn’t able to detect a much of a kick from the chilli cocoa powder. I did mention this to Sugar & Crumbs and they confirmed that they intended for the chilli flavour to be subtle, so I have adjusted the recipe below accordingly to give it a bit more warmth, but you can leave it out if you’re not a fan of chilli.

The coffee icing sugar is great. As soon as you open the bag you’re hit with the very distinctive scent of coffee and it does actually taste like coffee, rather than something synthetic. I noticed that the icing sugar is superfine and had no lumps (wooo!!!) which was wonderful news, as I’m all about saving time, so it was great not to have to sift this sugar before using it.

Add the wet mixture to the dry flour mixture and stir until there are no traces of flour left

Liberally flour your work suface and turn the dough out onto the work surface. The dough will be quite wet and sticky at this point, so knead into the flour until it is no longer sticky (the dough will still be soft) and form into a ball

Sandwich the ball of dough between two pieces of parchment paper and roll the dough between two pieces of parchment paper to a 1/4 of an inch thickness. Leave in the fridge for 30 mins for the dough to firm up.

After 30 minutes, remove the dough from the fridge and heat your oil in a heavy pot to 350 degrees Celcius (this is where the candy thermometre comes in handy). While the oil is heating, cut your doughnuts into rings, either using a doughnut cutter or you can use a 3″ and a 1″ round cookie cutter. You can fry the left over centres to make doughnut holes or re-roll to make more doughnut rings.

Line a baking tray with kitchen paper. Once the oil has reached, optimum frying temperature of 350C, gently (remember you’re dealing with hot oil) add doughnuts to the pan, frying for approx 2 mins on either side. You want the doughnuts to cook properly and evenly, so don’t overcrowd crowd the pan – no more than 2-3 doughnuts at a time, unless you’re using a really large pan.

After 4 mins, remove the doughnuts from the oil and leave to drain on the kitchen paper. Treat yourself to a doughnut hole, and then repeat until all your doughnuts are fried.

While the doughnuts are cooling make the coffee glaze, by adding milk to the coffee flavoured icing sugar until you have a glaze that is the consitency of runny honey.

Take each doughnut and dip it into the glaze, leave to dry on a cooling rack and repeat until you are happy with the level thickness of the coating. Decorate with sprinkles or enjoy them plain with a cup of tea or coffee.

These will last for 3 days stored in a biscuit tin or something similar.

If you’re interested in purchasing or finding out more about the products I used in this recipe, head on over to the Sugar and Crumbs website. At the time of this post going being published their icing sugars are priced from £1.99 – £4.99 each and the cocoa powders £2.99 to £8.99.

Did you give this recipe a shot? Have you used Sugar & Crumbs products before? Let me know in the comments below. Until next time bakers 🙂

Disclaimer: Products were sent to me to use and write an honest review. All views are my own. I have not been compensated for writing this review.

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